The Growth Assessment and Action Program (GAA) was introduced in the Centre region or the Northern Territory in 1997 and expanded to the Top End region in the second half of 1998. The objectives of the GAA program are to undertake timely and accurate assessment of the nutritional status of individual children, ensure an appropriate and timely response is made ( especially when growth faltering occurs in individual children) and provide regular information on growth patterns. The program is primarily targeted at children under five years of age resident in remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.
The GAA program has three components:
• Growth monitoring ( or assessing) of individual children
• Growth promotion or initiation of action to promote growth of individual children
• Surveillance of growth at the population level.
As part of the surveillance component of the program, growth measurement data on individual children are collated and used to inforn1 on growth status of children at the population level (community, district and territory levels). Estimates of child growth at population levels are only useful if they are based on growth data containing records for as many individual children as possible.